Flanders (Flandres) (2006)

68% of critics liked it
(56 reviews)
55% of users liked it
(2,231 ratings)

A man's reluctance to express his emotions has unfortunate consequences in both love and war in this drama from filmmaker Bruno Dumont. Barbe (Adelaide Leroux) is a pretty young woman living in a small village in rural France. Barbe loves Andre (Samuel Boidin), a rough-hewn farmhand who doesn't say… More A man's reluctance to express his emotions has unfortunate consequences in both love and war in this drama from filmmaker Bruno Dumont. Barbe (Adelaide Leroux) is a pretty young woman living in a small village in rural France. Barbe loves Andre (Samuel Boidin), a rough-hewn farmhand who doesn't say much and isn't comfortable sharing his feelings for her in any way other than sex. Frustrated by Andre's inability to show affection, Barbe vents her anger by sleeping with other men, and when Andre is drafted into the Army, he finds Barbe is saying goodbye to another of her lovers, Blondel (Henri Cretel), at the same time she's saying farewell to him. Andre and Blondel find themselves serving in the same outfit as they're sent to an unnamed Middle Eastern nation, where the grim circumstances of war wears away their humanity as they rape and murder civilians. Meanwhile at home, Barbe discovers she's pregnant with Blondel's child, and begins experiencing a nervous breakdown. Flanders received its world premier at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

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Rating, Runtime: Unrated, 1 hr. 31 min.
Directed By: Bruno Dumont
Written By: Bruno Dumont
Genres: Drama, Action & Adventure, Art House & International

In Theaters: May 18, 2007 Limited
On DVD: Nov 6, 2007
Studio: International Film Circuit

Critic Reviews

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
Dumont is much more confident when he sticks to the title town and the young woman the men left behind; his habit of alternating close shots with extreme long shots and his singularly unsentimental way of showing sex are as distinctive as ever.
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
This film has few tangible pleasures, such as some somber shots of Demester walking far away in a field. Its achievement is theoretical.
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
The harsh and lovely achievement of Bruno Dumont's Flanders is its mixture of the concrete and the abstract. It isn't about a specific war. It's about conflict of every stripe, in any time.
Desson Thomson, Washington Post
French filmmaker Bruno Dumont urges his audience to delve beneath the movie's melodramatic, often graphic surface and experience the film sensorially rather than intellectually.
Wesley Morris, Boston Globe
This is not a film of youth or wisdom -- it's not even a film of real intelligence. And so we flit between war and relative peace, with no insight or feeling or compelling style.
Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle
Don't fight this movie. Just release and get onto its wavelength.
Nick Schager, Lessons of Darkness
[A] stilted, affected term-paper treatise on the human condition.
Fernando F. Croce, CinePassion
A congealed shrug
Dennis Schwartz, Ozus' World Movie Reviews
Self-important film that presumes it has something pertinent to say about the human condition but doesn't.
Jeremy Heilman, MovieMartyr.com
Enough is left vague that an abstract quality is achieved, and the effect is one of amplification of the themes running throughout the film.
Prairie Miller, NewsBlaze
Sexually voyeuristic, low IQ take on the denizens of farm country.
Prairie Miller, Long Island Press
Dumont's latest sexually voyeuristic, low IQ take on the denizens of farm country.
Prairie Miller, WBAI Web Radio
Dumont's gift for dramatic expression of physical space and sensuously conceived landscape is undeniable. If only he had attached a coherent story to his vividly evoked sense of surroundings.
Jeff Shannon, Seattle Times
Anything but comforting. With its depiction of bestial behavior and shocking wartime violence, it's the kind of film that polarizes viewers through the raw power of its imagery.
Sean Axmaker, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
It's more provocative than realistic and his naturalism is contained in an arch structure, but his directness is affecting ...
Andy Klein, Los Angeles CityBeat
Among his other deficiencies, Dumont is ... utterly humorless. ... Flanders will leave you nostalgic for the wacky hijinx of films like Persona and The Passion of the Christ.
Mark Kermode, Observer [UK]
Dumont effectively conjures between the dreary routine of everyday life and the normalised horrors of this nameless conflict.
Beverly Berning, culturevulture.net
Flanders is relentlessly bleak, but as it works its way into your bloodstream, the aftertaste is somewhat akin to relief...For those who allow it, Flanders offers the comfort of recognition, and acceptance, of what it means to be human.
Derek Malcolm, This is London
Flanders is a film you'll either admire or hate.
Anthony Quinn, Independent
His camera, whether focused upon acts of horrific brutality or humdrum routine, maintains a steady, unflinching gaze. This, it seems to say, is life and death and nothing else.

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Featured Audience Ratings

Ross C

An awfully slow French movie with minimalistic dialogue that adds nothing to the war-movie genre. If you really must see it, at least skip the first half-hour!
Gordon A

Raw treatment of sex and death where little is said and shots last forever in typical french style. It improves when it moves to the theatre of war but it didn't have anything new to say particularly.
Walter M

[font=Century Gothic]With "Flanders," writer-director Bruno Dumont continues his examination of alienation in an isolated area, back on his home turf of France. Barbe(Adelaide Leroux) is a young woman who is watching the young men of the village go off to war, most of whom… More
[font=Century Gothic]With "Flanders," writer-director Bruno Dumont continues his examination of alienation in an isolated area, back on his home turf of France. Barbe(Adelaide Leroux) is a young woman who is watching the young men of the village go off to war, most of whom she has had sex with(They have sex because they cannot possibly think of anything else to do. Acting out of boredom, it is over as quickly as it begins. No foreplay.), which includes her closest friend, Andre(Samuel Boidin). Of course, this is not the wisest course of action for a woman living in such a small community...[/font] [font=Century Gothic][/font] [font=Century Gothic]War seems a natural topic for Dumont as his movies have gotten progressively more violent. Without war, I do not think these characters' lives would ever change, eternally locked into the same routine. Fighting a largely unseen enemy in an unknown country(I would like to say Iraq but I do not think that is possible under the circumstances), the soldiers display the worst aspects of their personalities which include rage, racism and misogyny.[/font]